Four posts last month and feck all at all this month. Right, well I’m gonna to have to fix that. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, I gotta do more of this blogging thing. There’s been too many distractions and I’ve been holding back on posting stuff here for a few reasons.
The first is the documentary I am making. It is about the ongoing disgrace that is the M3 motorway being build through the Gabhra Valley which is the ancient capital of Ireland known as Tara. I will be putting the making of the documentary online on the sister site ITISON.TV. Lot more to come there too. Well I guess I’m in a state of limbo with so much things on and I’ve knocked on practically every door looking for funding for this before I unleash it. But it’s not that easy and maybe because it’s current affairs. Well, I don’t want this to be a piece of trivia so I want to get it out there and engage the public in it in a unique way while the destruction of our heritage is ongoing. There, now I’ve shown my cards. Some would think that to be a mistake but I don’t care. I am looking for all sides to tell this story and there absence will speak volumes more. So many doors have been closed on me already with this and I have to overcome brick wall after brick wall. Well I must be doing something right. I won’t go into too much detail here. I will save that for another post. But I will say this - that so many people have wasted my time on this and stuck spanners in the works. And this is just with the production of this project. Collaborators have turned out to be quite the opposite. I thrive for collaborations, it makes for much better work and to back out of these opportunities after agreements are made with new agendas is just plain wrong in my book. Maybe I give unfamiliar people too much kudos. But my intuition is always acute and I need to go with it more. Sometimes I test it though until I know I am right about it. This is when people make slip ups, and the ones I am looking for to prove myself right. Moving on. I have immersed myself in a massive amount of research on the subject since June and have shot approximately fifty hours of footage so far. But there is still much more to do (I nearly used a Bertie phrase there!). I know it’s important and I won’t stop now or cut my losses as I have been advised. This project has changed a lot of things for me and I will continue with it. Anyway, I will talk about this more in a future post, I just had to write something on it here.
The second reason I have not blogged as much as I would have liked to and related to this is because ITISON is my business, I did not want to get too personal on this, in case it were to scare off potential investors. I am at a crucial stage in the development of that and the Tara project has side tracked me a little but it ultimately represents the kind of work I intend to do with ITISON. But I’ve change my mind on that a bit. I’m not going to censor myself. From here on in its no holds barred. This blog will continue to feature what it already has, but if also now start to become the independent media voice it has alway intended to be.
And the third, well, Facebook is such a distraction dammit!! But it’s a very useful tool. Say goodbye to email! Well not really, but it does have amazing potential and is by far the best social network available today. Opening the platform up to third party developers was the best thing they could have done. I’m excited to see where it will go and the overall impact it will have on the web.
So here we go. Expect more from ITISON in the blogosphere. IT IS ON ….
“….dude,…. it is on”
Saul Williams’ new album, “The Inevitable Rise Of Niggy Tardust” was released yesterday online in a similar fashion to the last Radiohead album a few weeks back. I’d heard a bit about this and being a fan a Saul’s and it’s notorious producer Trent Reznor, well I was pretty much sold before even hearing it. I paid the five bucks knowing it was going to a deserving artist and that many middlemen were being cut out of this transaction. Yesterday the download link arrived in my inbox and I give it a spin. I am impressed, very impressed. I did cringe a little when I seen there was a cover version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on the tracklisting but it turned out to be a good track. The album has a great energy to it and even though I don’t like to compare music so much to others, sometimes it is the best way to describe it. So this album has a combination of the best elements of Jimi Hendrix, NIN, Ministry, Gill Scott Heron, NWA , Public Enemy, Faith No More to name just a few flavours I hear here. But all in all this is Saul. My top 3 on this are Break, WTF? and No One Ever Does. But that’s likely to change! I recommend this.
Also check out his open letter to Oprah on his myspace blog for a look into the inspired mind of Saul Williams. These are profound words from a great human being and it has received an influx of positive comments and well wishes. Read it and keep.
Big up to the man, the poet.
From the website…
The wall of sound that we’ve created is tagged with such graffiti that a passerby would seek out doors and ways to ENTER. Once inside a world defined by dreams come true they’d find aligned with the simplest act of sharing what we treasure. Most people aren’t aware of the world of art and commerce where exploitation strips each artist down to nigger. Each label, like apartheid, multiplies us by our divide and whips us ’til we conform to lesser figures. What falls between the cracks is a pile of records stacked to the heights of talents hidden from the sun. Yet the energy they put into popularizing smut makes a star of a shiny polished gun.
A new high resolution image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Last Supper” has been posted online on a new site which specialises in macro images of artworks for closer inspection. The resolution is 16 billion pixels and that equals about 1,600 times your average 10 megapixel digital camera image.
This impressive study was done by none other than HAL9000! Well no, not that one, but rather an Italy-based firm specializing in the digital restoration and preservation of works of art through high-resolution art photography. The image size is 16.118.035.591 pixels, (172181 pixels wide and 93611 pixels high) and takes up a whopping 96 Gigabytes on disk. The panoramic photography technique used allows the stitching into one image of different photos shot using rigorous criteria.
Go have a look for yourself. It looks like more will artworks are to be added. Just click on the image of the work of art and you go to a page where you can explore it’s detail. There’s lots of great info about the technique used on the site also. See it here.
I took this photo back at the beginning of September on the Naas Road. I had seen these strange clothing printed onto walls hanging out to dry, albeit without the Persil ‘tag’, on a number of occasions, in a number of locations around the city. Being an admirer of street art, grafitti and the like, I was curious about the wet clothes plastered to the walls. It was a letdown to discover this was an ad campaign by Unilever when I spotted this ‘piece’ on the Naas Road, near enough to the Bluebell Luas stop. I made myself a note to go back and take a photo and this is it.
So, Lever Bros are getting down with the street vibes now then I see! I wonder though is this not ‘posting bills’ or advertising without permission? Contrast this with the sight further on up the road with the Anti Graffiti Van Man erasing some much better tags off a far less obvious wall.
Word!
Well, fair play to Radiohead. I heard about what they were up to a few days back and it brought a smile to my face. It’s common knowledge now that Thom and his team have put their new album “In Rainbows” up online for digital download at whatever price you’d like to pay for it. This is really gonna shake up the music industry, they’ve made a very important statement here. You can pre-order a vinyl (with cd) boxset for £40 also and you get the digital download for free. But the real action is with the download itself, costing whatever you can afford, or want, to pay for it.
I’ve not yet heard it myself but will get it soon. But for now I say; “hats off to Radiohead”
More info on the album is on a Wiki page here.
Nialler9 does a good 1st impressions review here.
Hicksdesign have some ideas for cover art for the digital version here.
A web survey that’s asks how much you paid for the album is here.
[edit] 13.10.07 - now that i’ve got to listen to it a few times; well, i like it. a lot. aptly for me, the track ‘Videotape’ is one of my favs, as is “House Of Cards”.
